Whatever happened to the Stanley Cup riot kissing couple? They're still together and living in Australia

Riot police walk in the street as Coquitlam-raised Alexandra Thomas, 25, and her Australian boyfriend Scott Jones, 30 kiss on June 15, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team the Vancouver Canucks lost in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Photograph by: Rich Lam
, Getty Images

VANCOUVER -- Amid the thousands of photos of violence and destruction from the night of Vancouver's Stanley Cup riot, a shot of a fallen couple embracing behind a line of riot police became perhaps the most famous image of all.

The "Vancouver riot kissing couple" — Coquitlam-raised Alexandra Thomas, 25, and her Australian boyfriend Scott Jones, 30 — decided to see what was happening on Granville Street after watching Game 7 at a friend's apartment in the city's West End.

The two toured the madness for a short time and were trying to escape to the Granville SkyTrain station when a line of riot police clearing Seymour Street knocked them down.

Jones comforted Thomas and was trying to get her to keep moving when his kiss was captured by photographer Rich Lam, himself scrambling to get out of the way of oncoming police officers.

"It was a pretty frantic moment; Alex was just on the ground. She didn't want to move," Jones says on the line from Australia.

They got back on their feet and eventually walked out of the downtown core, unaware that the moment had been immortalized.

By the time they woke up "slightly hung over" the next morning, the image had been seen by thousands of people and Jones had already been tagged by a friend on Facebook.

Social media sites were abuzz with talk of the photo being a possible hoax. Jones's sister had alerted media back home and less than 24 hours after the kiss, the pair had their first interview with a Western Australian newspaper.

Dozens of outlets clamoured to talk to Jones and Thomas, but they only did a handful of interviews. They were too busy saying goodbye to friends and packing up their lives as they prepared for a three-week California vacation, and then a long-planned move to Melbourne.

After their story broke they hired agent Max Markson, whose agency Markson Sparks! has handled publicity for Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and George W. Bush, to try to prolong their 15 minutes in the global media spotlight.

"Everybody was like, 'Oh, you're famous! You're famous! Cash in," Jones says of the initial buzz. "[There was] a lot of attention to begin with, but then people [lost] interest."

They received about $2,000 for an Australian magazine interview, but mostly they got perks like meeting Jay Leno on their California trip and being flown to Sydney, Australia for a TV interview and a stay in a classy hotel.

Jones, an aspiring standup comedian, said he wasn't quite seasoned enough to try to leverage his ephemeral fame into a career in comedy. Meanwhile, Thomas was never comfortable with the attention.

Once in Melbourne, the two happily settled back into anonymity, helped in part by the fact their faces were obscured in the famous photo.

Thomas, who has an engineering degree from the University of Guelph, is working for the state water company that supplies Melbourne with drinking water and sewage services. Jones is back managing the same Water Rat Hotel pub he worked at before his 10 months in Vancouver.

The two sleep under a blown-up version of the photograph, given to them by Lam. They are planning on travelling Europe in the fall and taking in Oktoberfest.

"Nothing bad came from it, so we can't regret it all," says Jones. "I think it's funny how everybody thinks it's so romantic and that sort of thing — it really wasn't."

"It was just a kiss to calm her down and it was captured in that second," he says. "There's another photo a couple seconds later where I'm looking back toward the cops and I'm pulling a weird face. That wasn't a particularly romantic photo, but a few seconds before it was."

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Riot police walk in the street as Coquitlam-raised Alexandra Thomas, 25, and her Australian boyfriend Scott Jones, 30 kiss on June 15, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team the Vancouver Canucks lost in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.

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